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I was in a bookstore today, and picked up a copy of the Ruby Cookbook.
Published only a couple of months ago, this book was a long in the
making, having been attempted and abandoned at least twice by other
authors over the past 5 years. Seeing it on display I was impressed
that the long-await project was able to see itself through to
completion.
I was even more impressed when I flipped thorugh the table of contents
and noted the wide range of applications that the book covered,
providing simple and concise examples of text processing, file I/O,
regular expressions, web programminng, unit testing, graphics, ActiveX,
database and persistence applications, as well as a host of other
topics. In many cases, Smalltlak could do such as well, and has
perhaps even better designed libraries. However, where Smalltalk is
lacking is in its documentation. I know this has been proposed in the
past, but with the publication of the Ruby Cookbook, I think we have an
opportunity to produce a Smalltalk cookbook.
Would it be worthwhile to simply copy the structure of the Ruby
cookbpook, and provide the equivalent recipe in Smalltalk, as opposed
to Ruby? The reason why I propose to emulate the Ruby cookbook, as
opposed to the Perl or Python cookbook, is because among all the
scripting languages, Ruby borrows most of its ideas and its object
model from Smalltalk. Though it may have built-in language features
such as regular expressions, mixins, and modules, most of the concepts
from Ruby map very well to Smalltalk. If someone were to set-up a wiki
for a Smalltalk cookbook, would Dolphiners care to contribute a
corresponding Smalltalk recipe?
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